This book provides the reader with a unique and insightful comparative historical analysis of five national cases in three different geographical areas with differing levels of politicized ethnic relations. Anke Weber, Wesley Hiers, and Anaïd Flesken begin by defining and outlining the processes associated with the politicization of ethnicity—“a long-term process whereby existing salient ethnic identities are utilized by political entrepreneurs for political purposes” (p. 139). Simply put, they examine the role of ethnicity in the political processes as expressed in these nation-states. It is this conceptualization and historical examination that makes Politicized Ethnicity a powerful and compelling read for anyone interested in carefully unpacking the politics of ethnicity. This operational definition is also quite relevant to current geopolitical events and could easily be applied to a variety of contexts in an age of mass migration and rapidly changing minority–majority populations within nation-states.

Specifically, the authors examine politicized ethnicity in Kenya, Tanzania, Peru and Bolivia, and the United States. Peru and Bolivia, and Kenya and Tanzania, are respectively paired cases in South America and Africa. Theses countries were paired because they share similar geography, historical origins, and political trajectories. Yet the pairs differ in terms of outcomes associated with the dependent variable—levels of politicized ethnicity. The authors carefully and skillfully develop this distinction in the middle chapters of the book. The United States was chosen as the “hard case” (as the authors note) because of discourse concerning “American exceptionalism” in terms of nation building and patterns of political participation. The authors aptly note that the politicized ethnicity expressed in the United States is often constructed in a black–white racial dichotomy—a divide created by the historical context of the African diaspora to North America and the political and social institution of slavery. This racial dichotomy operates to the present day and is often the lens through which other racial and ethnic groups are viewed and contrasted. They also assert that this dichotomy has contributed to ethno-racial politicization that has historically privileged whites and excluded nonwhites from a variety of domains, including labor rights and movements, access to public services and benefits, voting rights, and access to housing and education. It is all of these considerations that make the United States a seemingly hard case. Yet as the authors conclude in the last chapter, the United States exhibits a highly ranked ethnic system that is difficult to permeate (unlike the other four cases examined) because of the black–white racial dichotomy that shaped its nation-building pattern and is ever present in modern-day political processes.

The book is nicely structured with careful attention paid to the logic behind the selection of cases and how these cases fit together within the context of the theoretical framework presented. Its strength is that Weber, Hiers, and Flesken situate their case-study analysis within a robust theoretical argument. Their theoretical approach is state centered and heavily steeped in a Marxian framework of resource allocation and competition for scarce resources. The authors conclude that in all five cases, structural factors such as histories of colonial rule and biased resource allocation laid the foundation for the hierarchical ethnic identifications that they observed. They also assert that these traditions are alive and well today and continue to contribute to the ways in which politicized ethnicity and ethnic competition are expressed within these societies.

Weber, Hiers, and Flesken rightly focus our attention on respective political actors within these five national cases and how ethnicity (specifically ethnic relations) is politicized, albeit in different ways for the purposes of harnessing this political process and the degrees of political participation among the polity as expressed by voting. Following the works of Andreas Wimmer, they conclude that the pattern of nation building in each nation-state determined the respective levels of ethnic politicization. They apply Wimmer’s nation-building typology to each of the five cases and conclude that the more inclusive (whether in spirit or in practice) the nation-building pattern, the lower the levels of ethnic politicization.

While the authors make highly effective use of historical case-study methods and present a highly cogent and well-crafted review of the prevailing literature, they missed a critical opportunity to make their findings more generalizable and applicable to other contexts. A primary question remains at the conclusion of the book: Would the patterns and trends observed by the authors hold true in other contexts with similar histories and political trajectories? Perhaps more nuanced considerations of the role of the state and political actors at various historical stages of the respective nation-building processes might have addressed this question. This kind of analysis might also reveal the underlying motives of political actors and the structures that shaped and outlined the social positions of ethnics in the first place in these respective societies. For example, whiteness literature in the U.S. context has clearly demonstrated that the social advancement of previously defined “nonwhite” immigrant populations, such as the Irish and Italians (and other eastern and southern European groups), was tied directly to their eventual incorporation into whiteness identity, thus enabling their transcendence over the white–black racial dichotomy that previously restricted their respective access to a variety of public domains identified by the authors. The authors allude to Anthony Marx’s (1998) theory of race making in their introduction but do not elaborate on it. Marx examined the state’s role in categorizing groups, constructing social and legal boundaries, and then enforcing and shaping those boundaries. He explored why states act and how state policies and practices often reflect ideologies constrained by dominant political and economic claims made on it.

Perhaps an elaboration or exploration of the ethnic-making role of the state within their national cases would have yielded rich explorations into the motives of each state and its political actors, revealing for the reader a more salient and pointed analysis of present-day ethnic relations.